Month: January 2018

Hi, George reporting in from Tulsa with another episode in my ongoing struggle with Bluetooth.

Back in 2008 Steve Jobs called Blu-Ray a “bag of hurt.” A pretty good description of most of my experiences with Bluetooth. Had a 2007 Toyota Camry Hybrid that actually worked, though that car’s “Bluetooth Hands-Free” was phone only, no media. My 2017 RAV4 is a rolling Bluetooth disaster. Connections drop during calls, returning the call to the phone which may be in my pocket, and in handset not even speaker mode.. When starting the RAV if it was set for Bluetooth Media, it would randomly start playing random media. Daughter’s fairly recent Subaru shows some of the same behavior with iPhone Bluetooth.

I’m hoping there’s a software update for the RAV Entune system as the “tricks” Google suggested haven’t fixed it.

Joe Dugandzic of Smarter Home Life has been on the show several times in the past year talking about Home Automation. This time he’s on to talk about how being a Youtuber working on Home Automation landed him a full-time job at a home automation startup company called Lynky. It’s a story of his technical chops, grammar skills, his good sense about marketing, and his deep knowledge of Home Automation that helped him become the marketing and project manager for the Lynky Home Intelligence Hub.

You can find Lynky at lynky.com. Joe also talks about how he found a woman named Heather Mingo, the perfect voiceover artist to redo the Lynky marketing video through upwork.com, . The video for Lynky can be found on YouTube of course!

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart teaches us about inheritance (relationships between classes) and polymorphism. Now he said polymorphism is a concept that throws most first-level college students, but in an odd twist, I didn’t find it confusing at all! Plus, he lets us play with cows, ducks and turkeys in his example so it’s loads of fun.

We also have a great new study tool created by Dorothy, aka MacLurker. She created an index of terms so you can jump right to the blog post where Bart talked about the term. I’ve been using it and it’s grand! You might want to bookmark podfeet.com/blog/pbs-index.

I’ve got a couple of announcements to tell you, then a listener story from David Bogdan from Japan, and one from Denise Crown. At that point, I’m going to hand you over to Bart and me in Security Bits because there was so much to talk about with so many big stories. We’ll talk about password managers being used as trackers, the IOHIDeous vulnerability, and then spend a lot of time learning the truth (as of now) about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. It’s a fascinating session and Bart unpacks all of this for us beautifully of course.

Security Bits – 5 Jan 2018

Security Medium 1 — Password Managers as Trackers

Security researchers have found that less-reputable tracking firms have deployed JavaScript which uses invisible forms to trick password managers into entering information which can then be used as a kind of super-cookie that users cannot delete, and hence, track them around the web.

This problem affects all features that auto-fill usernames and passwords, whether or not they are native to the browser, or, provided by third-party plugins, so this affects everyone who saves passwords in their browser in any way.

Specifically, there was no adapter available to allow me to use my 27” Apple Cinema Display with the new Mac. The problem is that my display is the very last of the Display Port models, right before they came out with the Thunderbolt model. I can’t complain though because I received it as a free replacement under AppleCare when my 24” Apple Cinema Display wouldn’t work with my new-at-the-time 2013 MacBook Pro. Noticing a pattern here?

Denise Crown sent in an interesting story about Verizon, credits to your account and how to keep them.

This may help some of you. The ;TLDR version: I received a $324.96 credit back from Verizon… now, here’s what happened.

I bought myself an iPhone X after dropping into my local Verizon store to gaze upon it with my own eyes. The rep basically told me I could trade my 7 Plus and my bill would increase a few dollars. I ordered my phone and went on my way.

Fast forward a couple weeks and the phone arrives, and a few days later, my bill. When they processed my order, they removed a credit of $27.08 / mo for my husband’s phone! With 12 months remaining on that promo, it was $324.96!